Remembering a warm, wet -- and snowy -- decade

Anthony DePrimo/Staten Island AdvanceAn ATV rider enjoys a snowy Mill Road in New Dorp on Dec. 19, when just under a foot of snow fell across Staten Island. STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- The weather, of course, is ever changing, but if there's been any trend evident over the past 15 years -- the life span of this weather column -- it's been towards a warmer globe, and a warmer Staten Island.

Understandably, your reaction to that statement may be, "Oh, really?" As we continue to slog through this long, deep, winter cold wave -- along with most of the rest of the country, and Europe, even China -- it becomes easier to believe global warming is the myth the skeptics insist on.

Climate scientists have been busy this month insisting that our current cold weather is just part of our climate's natural variability, and they're right.

But if that's true, then what do you call those blistering heat waves we get during the summer?

I spent the first week of the new year and new decade crunching our local weather statistics for the past year and decade, and not surprisingly, with the passage of that much time some clear trends have emerged.

You can check my weather blog on silive.com (blog.silive.com/weather) for a complete rundown of all the numbers, but here are the highlights:

BIGGEST SNOWFALL

While the '00s were witness to the biggest snowfall on record at Central Park, 26.9 inches over two days in February 2006, the decade also featured the warmest winter on record here, where climate data extends back to 1869, in 2002.

Here's perhaps the most telling statistic from the decade just past -- 35 daily high-temperature records were set in New York City, along with just one low-temperature record. We also set 31 daily precipitation records and nine records for the most snowfall in a day.

It's well-documented that heavy precipitation events are part and parcel of the climate change we're currently seeing, which explains those latter records, as well as the fact that eight of the last 10 winters saw above-average snowfall with seven of the last 10 years recording excess precip.

Temperature trends, at least on an annual basis, are less transparent. The '00s recorded four warmer-than-normal years, but five years saw largely normal temps, with one year coming in colder than the norm.

The decade's warmest temperature at Central Park was 103 on Aug. 9, 2001, while the coldest was 1 on Jan. 10, 2004, and then again four days later.

The decade's wettest day was April 15, 2007, when 7.57 inches of rain fell in the park. That was also the second wettest day in the recorded weather history of the city.

Tightening our focus now, 2009 came in as our seventh straight wetter-than-normal year (in fact, last month was the fourth wettest December on record).

Last June had a lot to do with that. The month saw a whopping 23 days of rain, making it the second wettest June on record.

Thanks to all that precipitation the June-July period registered just one day warmer than 85 degrees, the fewest on record. COLD AND SNOWY

Last year also treated us to our first winter with above-normal snowfall in four years (2009's low temperature, 6 on Jan. 17, was also our coldest since 2005). Might we repeat that feat with the winter of 2009-2010?

Through the close of 2009 Central Park had measured 12.4 inches of snow, a sizable 9.4 inches over the norm.

With the North Atlantic Oscillation holding tight in its negative phase, we can expect this unseasonably cold weather to continue for perhaps another week or so, although the temperature forecast for this week doesn't appear at all harsh.

The saving grace of these chilly temps is that they're typically accompanied by high and dry conditions -- lots of sunshine and little in the way of precipitation. Expectations, however, are for our temperatures to moderate to normal levels for the second half of this month.

Finally, it's curious how these sorts of cosmic events line up, but the end of the year and the decade are coinciding with the end of this weather column, which I started writing -- basically on a lark, not knowing what I was getting into or really doing -- in 1995.

I'm leaving the Advance, Staten Island and the New York metro area, and returning to my roots in central Ohio, where as it turns out I'll continue writing about the local weather, a burden I may be fated to shoulder for the rest of my days.

But it's never been a burden; far from it. The weather has been a lifelong interest of mine, and I've been very fortunate to share that interest with a small but remarkably loyal readership here for a good, long time.

This month's full moon, commonly known as the Wolf Moon, occurs at 6:18 a.m. on the 30th.